Last night I figured that I better haul my ass down to KUT and get in some time answering phones, if I didn’t want to be left out of the spring “Pledge Early, End Early” fund drive. After 27 years of answering phones, and missing only one drive in all that time (the fall drive just after I got engaged), I don’t want to lose out on the title of The Oldest Living Volunteer. Yep, oldest living—if not in chronology, then in length of service. There are only three people—the morning DJ, a talking-heads show producer, and one engineer—who have been around the station longer than I have. Before the drive began, I signed up to work the Saturday folk-music show, but fund-raising has been going so well that the drive may end on Friday. Hence the “Pledge Early, End Early” name, and hence my idea that I’d better get in some hours earlier in the week if I wasn’t to be left behind.
So I rode the bus up once I got off work, and arrived in time for the last ninety minutes of All Things Considered and supper (a curious chili I wasn’t hugely fond of, a nice polenta casserole, other sides, and strawberries with whipped cream for afters). I worked through ATC, Marketplace, and The World, and carried on through the shift change for the evening jazz show.
You never know whom you’ll meet working pledge phones. I often don’t pay a lot of attention to the other volunteers’ names, at least until they’ve shown up three or four drives running and I can decide they’re in it for the (relative) long term. And that was why it took me until well after eight to notice the name the guy at the next phone was writing down in the “volunteer’s name” blank on the pledge form.
Once I did, I waited for him to get off the call he was taking, and then said, “If I’d known you were going to be here this evening, I would have brought my copy of ‘Austin Funk’ down and asked you to sign it.” He stared at me for a moment as though I’d dropped from Mars, then got this great big grin on his face, and gave me a big ol’ handshake. I’d recognized Mike Barnes, who played guitar for Steam Heat/Extreme Heat, an Austin funk band, for a couple of decades. He was astonished to find that I still had a copy of the album, and remembered who he was.
So we sat and visited, and he caught me up on all the people in the various bands who’d recorded for Fable Records, the label Steam Heat had been on. I have a collection of all the earliest Fable releases—47 X Its Own Weight, Starcrost, Steam Heat, the first three Beto and the Fairlanes LPs—so playing “whatever happened to” was a fun hour’s occupation. And after that several of us got into talking about the new Christopher Guest mockumentary, A Mighty Wind, which all of us decided we want to go see, and afterward wandered off into talking about Thelonious Monk, Jimmy Smith, Hammond B-3 organs, and everything generally—which is what you usually talk about at pledge drives when the phones are quiet for a moment.
Jack Nicklaus imported an embossed tin-plated football from Hollywood. Fnord.
